Western Digital's TV Live Hub Is the Anti-Apple TV

Share

Western Digital's TV Live Hub Is the Anti-Apple TV

If you've ever complained about a certain set-top box's dearth of local storage or support of exotic media files, you now have a clear alternative. Western Digital's TV Live Hub doesn't actually have much to do with live TV, but it will store and stream the stuffing out of whatever you've been keeping on your computer.

You want local storage for your movies, music, pictures and TV shows? How does 1 TB sound? Western Digital makes some of the biggest and best hard drives around, and this one packs a wallop. And for $200, the TV Live Hub only costs $70 more than WD's entry-level 1-TB external hard drive, the MyBook.

You want support for every file format you've ever dreamed about and video all the way up to 1080p? Here's the list:

I don't even know what some of those are, but OMG, I am furious at any device that doesn't support all of them now.

Wait – so far, it sounds like I'm just connecting a big-ass net-connected hard drive to my TV. Can it do anything cool with that internet connection?

Sure. The Live Hub is a fully-fledged media server, WD claims. Once it's on your network, you can stream its content to pretty much any device with a screen on your network: net-connected TVs, Blu-ray players, Xbox 360, PS3 – even iOS or Android devices using third-party applications. It can also share and sync media folders with PCs or Macs.

And the network isn't just local: You can also stream content from Netflix, Pandora, Flickr and YouTube, and upload content to Facebook.

The open question here – which I can't really speak to without getting a chance to try it out – is the quality of the user interface. Unlike Apple or Google, Western Digital isn't really a software company.

Wired recently reviewed the previous version, the Western Digital TV Live Plus, and found it was riddled with problems: Videos often played without their audio tracks, file-format support was not nearly as complete as the above spec list suggests, and video quality was hit-or-miss.

What it does offer is a different – and I think compelling – model for how you configure your hardware throughout your home network, how you store and share content that ultimately will be displayed primarily on the biggest screen in your house.

Here are the positions each player's taken on the board so far:

TiVo wants to record live TV.

Google wants to help you find it and give you apps for it.

Apple wants to rent you streaming TV and movies and bounce it between your other Apple devices.

WD wants to give you a big hard drive and share it around the house.

Everybody wants to let you stream Netflix.

Meanwhile, Microsoft wants to do most of those things and play videogames, too.

On the one hand, both Apple and WD are avoiding TiVo's and Google's attempts to bring software to bear on live TV. On the other hand, their approaches couldn't be more different.

Apple's world is all cloud: a box with a tiny footprint that makes as little noise as possible, offering lightweight, streaming rentals that disappear. If you're storing a library of data, you're doing it somewhere else.

WD's approach might seem more conservative, because it's still about building and storing a digital library of files in lots of different formats. But you could say it's actually much more radical.

It suggests that your entertainment media won't be pumped into your house through a box or live on the computer you use to make spreadsheets. The digital hub isn't your PC, and it definitely isn't a server somewhere sitting lonely in your office or basement.

The digital hub is your television – the one screen in your house that always stays in one place. And now, your television can talk to every other screen that comes into your house.